Modular verification of concurrent assembly code with dynamic thread creation and termination

  • Authors:

  • Xinyu Feng;Zhong Shao

  • Affiliations:

  • Yale University, New Haven, CT;Yale University, New Haven, CT

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Proof-carrying code (PCC) is a general framework that can, in principle, verify safety properties of arbitrary machine-language programs. Existing PCC systems and typed assembly languages, however, can only handle sequential programs. This severely limits their applicability since many real-world systems use some form of concurrency in their core software. Recently Yu and Shao proposed a logic-based "type" system for verifying concurrent assembly programs. Their thread model, however, is rather restrictive in that no threads can be created or terminated dynamically and no sharing of code is allowed between threads. In this paper, we present a new formal framework for verifying general multi-threaded assembly code with unbounded dynamic thread creation and termination as well as sharing of code between threads. We adapt and generalize the rely-guarantee methodology to the assembly level and show how to specify the semantics of thread "fork" with argument passing. In particular, we allow threads to have different assumptions and guarantees at different stages of their lifetime so they can coexist with the dynamically changing thread environment. Our work provides a foundation for certifying realistic multi-threaded programs and makes an important advance toward generating proof-carrying concurrent code.